The present invention relates to video signal processing cirucits, and in particular, to luminance signal processing circuits of a color television receiver.
In a color television receiver, it is customary to provide separate amplifying channels for the luminance and chrominance signal components of the composite color television signal. The luminance amplifier includes both contrast and brightness control circuits which are, at least to some extent, usually viewer operated. The contrast control adjusts the gain of a video amplifier to determine the peak-to-peak amplitude of the trace portion of the video or drive signal supplied to a kinescope or CRT. The brightness control typically adjusts the black level of the video signal to determin a point close to where electron beam cutoff of the CRT occurs. Typically, the adjusted black level is related to the back porch level of the video signal and the brightness is controlled by DC insertion or clamp circuits. This brightness level may correspond to optical black. However, this "black" level can be adjusted by the viewer to a higher brightness level, such as gray.
To this end, a level setting means for adjusting the brightness of a television receiver is modified by the setting of an amplitude control means for adjusting the contrast such that the maximum brightness level of the image on a CRT is modified in direct relationship to the adjusted level of contrast. In such a situation, a viewer adjustment of the contrast control often will not necessitate a corresponding viewer adjustment of the setting of the brightness control in order to maintain the apparent blackness of the dark portions of the image. The benefit of this may be understood by considering that in a bright ambient condition, the range of brightness adjustment required to make a given perceptible change in the illumination of details in dark portions of a scene is greater than the range required in a low ambient light condition. Typically, the contrast control will be set to a high level for viewing in high ambient conditions and set to a lower level for darker ambient viewing conditions. The contrast control can thus be viewed as an indicator of the viewer's perceived sensitivity to CRT light output levels.
It is not only desirable to avoid excessive brightness control range to improve the "human engineering" by providing the viewer with an optimal brightness adjustment range as discussed above, but it is also desirable to ease certain design constraints in the automatic beam limiter (ABL) unit. If excessive brightness control range is allowed, then the beam limiter is required to operate in a more complex manner to limit beam current effectively. A beam limiter senses some voltage or current having some relationship to beam current and controls some attribute of the video signal to limit the beam current to a predetermined amount. Two of the primary video characteristics which are usually controlled are contrast and brightness. To a point, controlling brightness to control beam current is a less desirable thing to do than controlling contrast in that what is changed is the DC component of the video signal and the black level, by definition, has low beam current requirements since it is "black". It is more desirable to reduce contrast. However, control over both contrast and brightness are necessary to protect against the situation where the viewer could turn the contrast as low as possible but has adjusted a wide range brightness control to a very high setting so that even with contrast very low, the CRT is still being driven to too much beam current. Typically, therefore upon the sensing excessive beam currents, the ABL unit first operates to reduce contrast; and, if the reduction of contrast does not bring the CRT beam currents within predetermined limits, the second level of operation is to reduce brightness. Thus, the design of the ABL unit needs to cover the situation of an extremely high brightness control setting at a low contrast setting which requires the ABL to exercise a wide range of brightness control.
With a wide range of viewer brightness control settings, the ABL design choices are either to have a wide range of control to adjust contrast or to have a wide range of control to adjust brightness. If the ABL is given much over a 4 or 5:1 change in contrast control capability coupled with an abnormally high viewer brightness control setting capability, the result can be an excessively washed out appearance to the picture. Thus, anything that can be done to avoid having an excessive viewer brightness control range permits having the beam limiter rely more on controlling contrast which is the preferred approach.
Thus, it is desirable to design the viewer brightness control range to be as small as practicable in order to relieve the ABL from having to compensate for the possible excessive conditions discussed above. In this manner, the present invention acts to reduce the complexity and possible errors introduced by ABL actions.